Thanks Ashleigh for teaching me a few photoshop tricks I wasn't using.
Scanning and digitizing art and sketches has been such a pain-point for me.

I'm experienced in digital art, retouching, psd and illustrator, but I prefer drawing images manually and spending less time on the computer. With digitizing, my goal is to spend more time manually art making and less time retouching.

Watching you, I'll say, you are a wizard. You make it look like a 5 minute retouch/clip, but (perhaps because I chose a more complicated watercolor flower), I still was testing these two methods for a few hrs, trying to get it down and replicate the method. I agree, method 2 is smoother, I tested it on a watercolor img, an acryclic img and an ink drawing. Watercolor was the fastest of my tests, maybe because of the hard edges.

I love it, I'll keep at it. I really loved learning about the selection of continuous or not, modify-contract (gamechanger), the select-mask (thanks for those settings, now saved). Thanks for sharing, this kind of sharing is so great!


Process 1 - starting this watercolor img: 

 

Process 2: using method 2 (testing contract by 1 and 2, and used contract by 6 in this case)

Process 3: testing it on a colored background, not bad! SO much easier than cutting a mask. Thank you!